


Murderers, Traitors and Thieves

by AtlinMerrick



Series: Friendly Fire: Hux and Ben [1]
Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015), Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Always a happy ending always, Angst with a Happy Ending, Friendly Fire AU, M/M, each man is a soldier but not a murderer, the galactic concordance is still in place
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-06-09
Updated: 2017-02-28
Packaged: 2018-07-14 03:09:11
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 4
Words: 10,573
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7150616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/AtlinMerrick/pseuds/AtlinMerrick
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Galactic Concordance signed after the fall of the Empire held. The First Order never rose. There is a long-standing, militarised peace. And Kylo Ren and Armitage Hux never went dark. Not…<em>quite.</em></p><p>However, when Hux's military career is cut short by friendly fire, he goes looking for the legendary prince-Jedi, an almost-forgotten man some say used to be a healer.</p><p>This is the story of how two very different men at the edges of darkness, together find light. A little. <em>Enough.</em></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Friendly Fire

_Murderers, Traitors and Thieves_ was a ridiculous name for a bar.

It was especially pointless for a place whose clientele consisted of Core Worlds holiday makers, come to see Illodia's ebony caves or to get tipsy under the wine water falls.

The only murderers in this pretty place had slaughtered a fifty credit Surelian steak, the only traitors were those who drank too much wine water and woke with the wrong spouse or species in their bed.

Ah, but thieves, that was another thing entirely. Brigadier Hux, recently of the Imperial Army and now on med leave for the last ninety-one days and—Hux sat straighter in his red velvet chair, glanced at his chrono—and sixteen hours, well he could tell you that _Murderers, Traitors and Thieves_ was definitely thick with the latter.

There were the thieving bartenders pouring strong Donar brandy in tiny, delicate cups. Thick as syrup it was, and so sweetly sweet that a man like Hux, still getting used to a few luxuries again, found himself each night ordering more than his credit balance could stand.

The place was also full of delicately larcenous escorts who could always sense the last-nighters, holiday makers who'd lift with one of the luxury ships come morning and who could, with teasing promises, be taken for their last credits tonight.

There were the ruinous pink frostcakes that stole the willpower of the unwary, infectious music that made off with one's ability to sit still, and games of chance that favored the foolish just long enough to make the fools believe the cards favored them.

Ah, but these were nothing really and no comparison to the real thief here. He was a master that one. Somewhere behind the black velvet curtain draped across the nearby stage, he could—

"Another brandy, sir?"

Hux shook away his musings, looked up. Oh such a pretty thing the server was, slim as a willow, skin a pale, frail blue. He slow-blinked water-clear eyes and seemed to sway in his own current.

Hux reflexively smoothed a cuff, then reached across his chest to tug his great coat straight and quick-smart he curled in on himself, a groan guttering out low and breathy as pain shot through him saber-hot. He tried to count the seconds while the agony crested then eased and his vision cleared, but he only got as far as _one, one, one._

As always it went forever, or maybe just half that, Hux never knew. He did know that when finally the pain faded and he ran the back of his hand across a sweat-pricked cheek that his smile was off center. "Two this time," he said, his voice low and thick. "Two please."

As if he hadn't just watched the Human go through a strange ritual of suffering, the blue man nodded gracefully and walked away. Hux watched him flow through the inattentive holiday crush with little twists of his shoulders and hips and again Hux felt a sharp and sudden pain, but it wasn't the prosthetics inside him this time, no, it was something deeper and more intimate.

It was need.

Hux grinned.

It was a big, ugly thing that grin and it didn't sit quite right on his face and so Hux grinned bigger, until he could feel it in his eyes. Finally the prickle of the new pain faded, just a little, just enough.

"It works on a surprisingly large number of lifeforms," the doctor on the hospital satellite had said. "Smile the pain away." Then she'd grinned at Hux so wide he'd seen the second set of teeth in her throat.

He didn't believe her, not back then, right after the accident. Didn't believe about the smiling thing, about the getting better thing, not about much of anything at all because in those weeks after he'd nearly died, the pain had proved the biggest thief.

It stole his focus, his words, it robbed him of his absolute faith in order. It took Hux's dignity too, but in those dark days right after he didn't kriffing care. Though the cadet who'd stupidly, accidentally discharged her blaster into the ship's bridge had died instantly, some days Hux figured her for the lucky one. Because Hux had had the misfortune to survive that friendly fire. The white-hot wreckage that had flayed open his chest, shattered his ribs and broke his sternum in two, well it hadn't left him anything at all like alive, not really. Yet it wasn't just his body destroyed that day, it was his purpose.

A ripple of black velvet across the stage drew Hux's eye, but the curtain quickly settled. Not so Hux's mind.

Since he could remember he'd wanted to be a soldier on a starship, keeping the peace the Galactic Concordance had brought, keeping things _in order._ And he did it, despite everything his _father_ had done, despite even his own doubts. Hux was a superb soldier, on track for major general within the year, and though everyone on the _Accord_ pretended his was just med leave, Hux knew the Imperial Army—any army, for the Alliance was no better—would have no place for him after he healed, because he wouldn't be the _same_ after.

For a long and feverish time he hadn't wanted to be, and maybe still didn't. Because if it wasn't the pain of bones and muscle and _soul_ still mending, it was anger at the cadet who'd done this to him. If it wasn't that then it was the kriffing self-pity after another surgery, though at least those were over since they'd put the klick in him.

At the thought of the metal moving in his chest, Hux remembered the old Togruta soldier who'd come to see him after that final operation.

Kaash had lost an arm and both montrals in the Battle of Jakku when her commander had misjudged the range of a Stokhli light canon. From her Hux had learned several important things.

'Friendly fire' was the legacy of every sentient species that had ever stood up and then picked up a gun. The dark empty feeling of the wounded after, the guilt and disappointment, the certainty that they'd failed, that legacy belonged to all of them, too.

Hux also learned that the smiling thing, that stupid, annoying smiling thing? Well it worked. Sort of. It didn't take away pain, no, only time could do that and time moved awfully slow when half your chest needed rebuilding, but Hux finally learned that smiling stopped the sweat prickling at the back of his neck, unwound the tension in his shoulders and belly and thighs, a hyper-readiness that only made the pain worse.

Now, today, yesterday, whenever he twisted wrong or breathed too deep and it felt like a lightsaber was sinking hot between his ribs, Hux grinned a pfassking great grin, he sipped his strong brandy at this ridiculously-named bar and, very much most of all, Brigadier Hux, late of the Imperial Army, watched that dark curtain draped across that small, perfect stage in front, and now, today, yesterday, he waited.

"Thank you," Hux nodded as two drinks were placed beside his credits, then flushed when long blue fingers brushed over his hand as the server palmed the money.

He'd have gone dark just then, at the feel of those warm fingers against his, at the thought of what he needed and did not have, but just then the heavy curtain rippled again and this time, oh this time it looked so much like the form of a man against that velvet, a big, broad-shouldered man, and Hux grinned again, only this time it wasn't a ward against pain, it was a tenterhook and tip-toe eagerness, it was his heart tripping fast because _Murderers, Traitors and Thieves'_ greatest thief moved behind that dark drapery, oh yes.

Hux saw the Human quite clear in mind's eye, and why not? He'd been coming here nearly every night for weeks, getting drunk on the sweet liquor, and patiently waiting for the dancer.

Masked and jeweled, bare to the waist, the lovely thief called himself Mythos but there was nothing of the figment about the man. Though his Human skin looked ghost-pale under stage lights, he was well over six foot, broad of shoulder, chest, and hip, his big body as real as rock.

Hux turned his chair toward the stage, the pain another slash-and-burn across his chest and maybe he was getting addicted to that sharp misery, because the hurt meant healing, didn't it? And healing kept him believing he'd go back to his old life, a useful soldier in a useful army keeping the terms of a useful agreement. So though he wouldn't admit it to himself, sometimes Hux pushed, pushed, pushed his body in the tiniest and the worst of ways.

Eyes fixed on the curtain, he pressed his hand to the bumps in his chest and, as always, imagined he could feel the klirium-kelsh animated metal—everyone just called it klick—moving inside him, rebuilding bones. A hybrid of the adhesive used on the hulls of spacecraft, klick crawled over what it was repairing, mending fissures or, in Hux's case, building up bone from scratch.

And it adapted. As muscles and tendons changed in healing, so did the klick. Though Hux could not in reality feel it moving he _could_ feel the waste heat generated by the working metal, a fever-hot warmth just below the skin.

Some nights Hux would lie in bed, hands flat on his chest, searching for those hot spots. Some nights he'd freak out if he found none. Because he still hurt so much, surely the klick wasn't done, it couldn't be done, this much pain couldn't be his for the rest of his life. In those flop-sweat moments of panic Hux would thrash in bed until the pain was a shock right through his body, locking up arms and legs and a shout in his throat, and then he'd feel it, pinpricks of heat spreading from the middle of his ruined chest and sweeping out to his ribs.

The curtain moved again, a slow parting onto an empty, shadowed stage, and Hux pressed a hand to his chest and did what he's done every single day since the synth-skin had grown together over the klick: He danced fingers over the bumps in his chest, counted each one in reflex… _onetwo…threefour…fivesix…seveneight,_ as if counting the moments until the man would step into the spotlight.

They said he was a healer once, this Mythos, that he'd done things most Jedi and Sith said were impossible.

Hux breathed deep and held it, and he wondered if, when the man had done the things legend said he couldn't, if the healing had made heat, if being made whole by the Force _burned?_

A bell, high and delicate and distant-close, began to chime and from stage shadows a bare-chested, masked man stepped barefoot graceful into the light. Hux's skin went hot, as if suddenly the klick was everywhere inside him, as if it had gone rogue and taken to wandering, remaking him wherever it chose.

The dancer stepped toward the edge of the stage and in the faint breeze of his movement, his sheer, low-slung pants rippled. The jeweled cuffs at his wrists and biceps sparked in the low light as he lifted arms high. Then, with just the music of that faint and persistent church-like bell, the man began to sway his arms and roll hip and belly, languid, seductive.

Like a heartbeat the bell marked each honey-slow rocking of his hips, each pointed-toe lift of his feet. When he turned his back Hux, as always, leaned forward, sat straighter, mesmerized by the width of the man's hips and shoulders, the unmarked expanse of his pale back, bisected by the silk scarf wrapped round his head.

The bell faded as the man's arms drifted down, then lifted again as if on a current. When a hymnal drone started up whisper-soft, the dancer took a chest-broadening breath, turned, and behind the mask Hux saw his dark eyes blink and then close. The soft stage light showed black-painted lids brushed with a comet-trail of silver.

Every night the music was the same but the dancer's dance changed. Sometimes Mythos covered the stage, sometimes he was steady and still in a single spot. Fast, then slow, a river flowing always a bit different, tugged sharp by or released from the tidal pull of yellow moons.

Hux bit his lips. He'd been a soldier before he knew what one was, even when he was small he'd been focused and forward and he'd always thought there was little of the lyrical in him.

Then he'd been quite literally torn open and something always there escaped while he started bleeding out. A man might call it poetry but Hux thought it was more solid than that. Hux saw what was behind things now. The soldier wants order but what does order mean? It's not a stricture, it's not regimentation and conformity, it's…elegance. It's certainty that here grows a green thing, there a blue and over there the blood-red. The river rises, the river falls, a man breathes in and out and there is the certainty of these things, there is order in the knowing, and in that order and knowing is beauty.

Maybe it was as simple as that. Hux saw beauty now. A man breathes in and his bare shoulders widen, a man breathes out and shadows dance over his bare belly and ribs and that is a new and beautiful order and if he couldn't be a soldier any more, if he couldn't bring order to chaos, Hux could find order, follow it, he could—

Up on that stage Mythos stilled, opened his eyes, looked right at Hux.

—worship it.

The bell began again, then a chime, then a chant, and the dancer swayed, stepped, undulated and, slow blinking he did not look away from Hux.

Yes, the dance was different every night. Sometimes the man's movements were soft, sometimes he was a cascade of spins and rolling thrusts, other nights he was a heady mix of these, one flowing into the other and back again until Hux was breathless, but always he stayed on that stage near enough but remote as myth, as far away from everything as a world on the outer rim.

Well, not tonight.

With the delicacy of a man treading on roses, Mythos flowed down the stage's steps and swayed in and amongst the small audience.

Those who hadn't been watching were now, though still just half-interested. Hux didn't understand how that could be, how they found something here that was more than _this,_ but they did. With glances and grins they looked at the man gliding by them, a cheeky few pretended they'd touch the dancer's body but none did, almost as if they couldn't.

In less than a dozen steps the dancer drifted to a stop in front of Hux and he waited until Hux lifted his chin and met his eye. Then, as if he did it every night, the pale man removed the scarf wrapped round his head.

Dark hair cascaded inky over his shoulders, and he swayed sinuous before the straight-backed brigadier, then went briefly to his knees, draping the scarf over Hux’s legs. He was long gone and the curtain closed before Hux's blush faded.

When it finally did Hux realised he'd learned a few new thing tonight.

You can see a smile behind a mask, oh yes, you can.

And though he'd thought he was hiding here in this pleasant city on this pleasant planet, anonymous, well it seemed that Ben Organa or Skywalker or Solo Amidala, Ren or Kylo or some absurd hodge-podge mix of all of those, well that ex-princeling, ex-Jedi, ex-big deal calling himself Mythos…he knew who Hux was, too.

Going to his knees, placing that silk scarf on Hux's lap so carefully, he'd whispered low, "Tomorrow, Brigadier. And tomorrow."

Hux grinned at the dark cloth draped over his legs and rubbed the back of his hand over jaw and cheek. His skin was hot as a fever and his hand shook and the most amazing thing was…

…nothing, nothing, _nothing_ hurt.

—  
_I love the line in Star Wars where Kylo tells Rey he has no idea where 'the murderers, traitors and thieves you call friends' are. And though Kylo and Hux have followed certain similar paths to those of the film, here neither is a killer. That doesn't mean they aren't dark boys, looking for light. That's the next chapter. And the next. And the next… And here's[an image of what's inside Hux's chest](http://atlinmerrick.tumblr.com/post/145680720589/fic-murderers-traitors-and-thieves-the-galactic)._


	2. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In the dream the dancer crawled across their bed, pressed close, big hands across Armitage Hux's chest and _oooh_ nothing hurt. "Tomorrow Brigadier," Ben Organa whispered, nipping at Hux's ear. "And tomorrow."

Warm weight on top of his bare body, grounding, heavy. Muscles hard, skin soft, thighs clutching, mouth nuzzling at his neck, whisper-giggling—

Hux woke up laughing.

He grinned stupid at the orange-painted ceiling of the posada, opened his mouth to breathe in warm breath that wasn't there but…Hux felt it anyway, felt the dancer's humid heat against his tongue, so Hux opened his hungry mouth wider.

He opened his legs too, took hold of his cock, licked at the air, starved for sweat and salt, for a needy groan huffed into his mouth, for the warmth and weight of the man in his dream.

Hux fisted the silk scarf—the one he'd sniffed and sucked at for an hour last night, then draped over his naked chest—and stroked himself soft-hard with it, pressed his palm to his mouth, imagined it was the mouth of Ben Kylo Organa Amidala Solo Skywalker Ren, the famous-infamous not-Jedi prince who'd run away.

Hux grunted, lipped his palm, bit the skin with little nips, and it wasn't his own flesh beneath his tongue, it was that spotlight-pale body with its rare galaxy of moles, it was a man who'd seen him and knelt before him and yet Hux had looked up and up and—

"Ah…ah…ah!"

Hux came, hot and wet. He huffed a soft laugh and dropped his hand over the come to keep it warm, to make the moment linger, a fetish he'd had since the first time he woke to find his cock spurting onto his belly.

He didn't have wet dreams anymore, always woke just before the coming, which he loved, loved the foregone conclusion of it, the sense of inevitability, the crest and pleasurable crash. That momentum-in-progress was delicious and so he pressed his palm to the come and imagined it was the dancer's. He didn't try to figure out how it got there but he did daydream an afterward, pretended he felt the man's dozy body curl tight against his, warm, wide mouth at his neck, their fingers twining.

Hux slept again, deep and dreamless.

When he woke hours later it wasn't to pleasure but to nightmare.

To the bright flash of a blast bolt going through a control panel and into a fuel cell. To compression waves that felt like immense hands pressing against him, then the wing of a TIE fighter a dozen feet behind digging a wide and bloody trough up the back of his head. He slid to the launch bay floor, the way made smooth and slick by his own gore.

Hux opened his eyes to night shadows on the painted posada ceiling, arms and legs pain-frozen, chest constricted so tight he could only suck tiny sips of air and immediately his brain screamed for the pain patches…how how he'd slept rightthrough…the patch painpatch the…on the table 'side him, always there they were in the fresher too juss there, juss there always close but couldn't do patches now t'much too much hurt…oh god he was oxygen starved drunk…couldn't breathe past the pain…hypoxia…

Hux grunted, sweat stung his eyes an' how could it do tha…tha thin…mmm…gravity was wrong i'was…

Hux opened his mouth and pushed out a big sound, big as he could make, then again and again until it cut through the addle-brained misery because he had to move, the pain wouldn't go away, no the patches wouldn't do anything to touch this, he had to get up, get to the lethe, needed the lethe but had to _work_ for the drug because—

More moaning louder moaning _louder._

—cause he couldn't juss want it he had to crawl for it, crawl crawl like a Gorryl slug like a Hux who wouldn't get addicted a Hux can't looosss control…

When it seemed like his rib cage was being pulled out through his skin adrenaline finally shifted Hux's arms and legs for him and he twisted hard and sharp and fell to the floor, no energy to cry for the hurt of it so he crawled because that was real and true, like Gorryl slugs all the Huxs in all the core worlds crawl so awfully well to get their lethe they do they can they will an an…

…an if he told the med tech that his ribs was comin out his chest would she run? He inched toward his comm, trying to think of the right words to make the tech give him his lethe because he'd told her weeks and weeks ago when he got here, he told her and made her repeat it back to him "I need to earn it, do you understand? Don't ever give it to me unless I earn it," and he'd made her promise and she did, saying the words twice right back to him and even saying them the way that he did, nodding sharp and quick and solemn, as if she knew exactly what it all meant. "Earn it. Earn it."

So Hux crawled to his comm because the posada's med tech had his lethe tucked away in the clinic and so she had bring it to him he had to hurt so so bad that he crawled for it earned it _earned_ it because then he would never want it just because it made everything perfect for awhile, as perfect as a dancing dream dancer as perfect as life before the accident an an—

Hux crawled to the chair by the window, scrabbled for his trousers and pulled them to the floor, groped so ineffectually for the pockets that he started to cry in frustration but he was already crying so that was okay and it was forever that he could feel the bulge of the comm in there somewhere but he couldn't get it but it was there but he couldn't get it but but…

* * *

The med tech sat on the edge of the young brigadier's nice bed in his nice room. She eyed the port of the lethe pump again, that almost-pin-prick small transparisteel hole low on her patient's hip. Everything looked good, fine, just the way it was supposed to look. Her patient was resting easy now, breathing deep, pink-pale again instead of corpse-white.

The tech, Sarus, she was called Sarus, watched the brigadier's pulse thump-thump evenly across his bare chest. She counted the eight knots of klick beneath his skin and wondered if he could feel it moving. She'd heard about the stuff but never seen anyone with it in. Thinking about it made her back itch.

Hux watched the tech stare at his chest. She was humanoid and kind of yellow at the edges; he wondered what sun made yellow Humans.

"I don't hate her."

Hux pressed long, pretty fingers one by one by one on the bumps between his nipples, shifted his gaze to the afternoon shadows on the ceiling. "The cadet that did it, she had no exterior wounds, even though she was just two meters from the blast."

Hux glanced at the tech, expecting a look of disbelief, but she was still watching his fingers brush light and delicate, her head cocked, breathing low, shutting down extraneous input so she could do one thing.

Listen.

So Hux gave her something to listen to. "Blast physics. She got the blast. I got the wreckage."

Then just like that Hux was tired. He found that confession never cleansed, it enervated, it wearied. Closure wasn't.

His hand dropped from his chest and he closed his eyes, sleepy. Amazing how quickly he'd got used to listening to his body instead of forcing it. A lifetime of martial lessons unlearned in months.

He breathed slow, wondered if he'd ever have words to explain things, important things, like how Cadet Ter's body had been pushed back by the blast and into a chair. Though unmarked by the explosion, she'd looked as dead as she was yet…her corpse had folded gently at the knees, chin on her chest. She'd looked almost beautiful.

Hux hadn't seen that for himself, just the holos later from the black box. He never paused on his own bloody body when he watched the footage. He'd fallen so awkward over the fuel lines, against the fighter. Chest open, bones pearl white in hangar light, he'd looked a messy sort of dead, so he always looked at Ter instead. Folded down so carefully like she was he thought she looked like a penitent before a priest, genuflecting and about to rise, forgiven.

Most times that he let himself think about the seeming-acceptance of her body, the ease of her death, it triggered impotent fits of fury. Why should dying look so painless when surviving _hurt so fucking much?_

The rage, like the confessions, never cleansed in those months and weeks right after. It fed on itself in a fruitless cannibalization, until that sunny day he'd walked alone to the River Em, just a week after he'd returned to the only place that might qualify as home.

"Oh."

That one word was all it took to finally give Hux direction and focus, driving him right off Arkanis only weeks after he'd arrived, away from all of his doctors, out of his family's orbit, the army's kriffing orbit, away from anyone and everyone who'd known what he used to be.

Just that one cruel word.

_Oh._

He'd been a friend of a friend or something like that. A moon-faced man who acted as if he knew Hux and so they made small talk, lots of small talk down by the calm river, so much too much endless endless talk and it was all right at first, then kind of not, then so much not because despite a powerful analgesic patch Hux was having breakthrough pain and he needed to get back home _now._

"Well you've just suddenly gone whiter than usual," the man had laughed. Maybe. Maybe he'd laughed, Hux isn't sure now. He does know that his reply then was honest because of all the things the accident had done to him, freeing him to say what he meant was one of them.

A gesture at his own chest. "Accident, not feeling well right now."

"Oh," the man said, blinking in surprise. "Wasn't that a couple months ago?"

The therapists, they were always telling Hux what to expect. The guilt and the self-pity, the lethargy and frustration. The anger. Anger at a world of people who's greatest worry was missing the evening shuttle. Anger at people with easy lives. So. Much. Pfassking. Anger.

_Oh._

_Wasn't…that…a…couple…months…ago?_

As if pain had a god damn expiry date, as if healing happened the minute the awful was over.

Ninety seconds is a long time when you're shouting through most of it, when you're breathless from finding eight different ways to yell at a near-stranger, "Am I fucking taking too kriffing long for you? Eight fucking weeks? Is that it? Is that how long you get to get over losing everything?"

At the end of Hux's tirade the man had nodded awkwardly—which was nothing, nothing, absolutely _nothing_ the same as apologetically—and then he'd said it again, one word so powerful it drove Hux away from the only place that qualified as home.

"Oh."

Hux was offplanet the next day.

He couldn't stay in space though, too fitful in the confines he'd always before found such a comfort. So he headed into the Core Worlds, waiting for one of them to be right, because he'd always had a soft spot for the disorder of myth, for the idea that something could call to you, that it could be fated, that you'd just somehow _know._

Illodia hadn't really called him; it was just that thing he'd read months back had stuck in his head, the thing about Leia Organa and some amendment she was proposing to the Concordance. There'd been a small mention of her son in the article. They were always doing that, bringing in her problem child and something-something 'healer,' something-something 'accident,' something-something…Illodia.

So Hux had stopped here.

He shook his head, felt a tug as the med tech removed the pump. He tried to open his eyes.

"Illodia," he muttered, and he thought she said something in reply, something soft. Something…sleep.

Hux always slept deep after lethe. He dreamed too, but he did that a lot now anyway. The dreams weren't anything like the ones he'd had before the accident. Those had always been hyper-detailed and unrestful, full of charts he was meant to check, full of soldiers too numerous to count, ship's air that was stale or wrong and maybe it was because he hadn't checked the right chart and he always woke from those dreams tired.

The dreams now were different. They were good. He swam in warm black water sometimes. He walked on sky-blue moss. He breathed deep of flower-sweet air. And sometimes, this time, he dreamed he sat on the side of his bed and he picked up the dancer's black silk scarf and ran it through his fingers.

The scarf was warm, having just come away from the body of Leia Organa's son. Hux lifted the scarf to his nose and breathed. He smelled skin and sweat. A Human lethe. Healing.

And in the dream the dancer crawled across their bed, pressed up close behind him. He placed big hands across Hux's chest and nothing hurt, oh nothing at all hurt. "Tomorrow Brigadier," Ben Organa whispered, nipping at Hux's ear. "And tomorrow."

In a tidy little posada in a fine little holiday city on a pretty holiday planet, a relief-drunk Hux slept right through 'tomorrow' though. Right on through.

* * *

Sarus Kedia Os closed the brigadier's door carefully. She stayed put until she heard her patient's soft snore then walked quietly away, scratch-scratching at her back.

Nearly as long as her arm and ropey-thick from poor healing, the scar didn't technically itch because it had no feeling, not any more. It had done when it was fresh and festering with a vongspawn infection. Shame there hadn't been any lethe then. There'd been good old morpho though, and brandy, and back then nobody cared if you got addicted. Everything was a mess after the Empire fell and everyone got through the best they could.

As she pushed outside, Sarus glanced back at the brigadier's door. God, that bright-haired boy was barely old enough to have been born back then. Such a bright, brave boy.

Stuffing the empty lethe packet in her pocket, Sarus licked her lips, started walking down the promenade, scratch-scratching some more. God she needed a drink, something sweet and dark and strong. Tava's had dozens of brandies, cheap. Pretending she wasn't doing it Sarus fished in her pocket, counted her credits. She had more than enough _for_ more than enough.

Yet even while she looked at a palmful of credits thinking _good, that's good, can get well and truly drunk_ _on this,_ Sarus was tugging her comm out of her other pocket and thumbing a number quick-quick. The man on the other end started talking the moment he answered and kept talking until Sarus veered from the crowded boardwalk and pressed her back against a wall, saying _yes, yes I've stopped walking._ The man kept talking until Sarus hurled her handful of change and said _yes, yes I just threw the credits into the lake._ The man _kept_ talking until finally she took a deep breath and whispered _thank you Anlyn, yes I will_ and hung up.

Later tonight Sarus would mark another day on the calendar back behind her bedroom door. She'd be surprised that tomorrow'd make a hundred and eighty days straight.

Right now though, Sarus strolled along the promenade once more, breathed deep of the Donar flowers and she never noticed the big, dark-haired man who hurried past her.

Benjamin Organa—that was it, that was the sum total, everyone could just forget the kriffing names the kriffing press dredged up from the past—shouldered his rucksack and walked faster.

Even though he'd cut his dance short at _Murderers, Traitors and Thieves_ he was still running late. His own fault. He'd stood behind the curtain for the longest time, searching the audience, but the bright-haired brigadier who was always there, wasn't.

So Ben had danced as if he was.

That had meant belly and hip moving in slow, lazy undulations, it meant lifted arms rippling like a gentle current because he knew the brigadier liked that, because he always smiled when Ben danced like that, a sweet smile.

Ben was used to lusty gazes and he liked them well enough, but the brigadier…he was different. He showed up night after night, which wasn't common in a city like Abka, where everyone was passing through, but what was rarer than his constancy was the brigadier's gaze. Oh, sure there was lust in it, but there was also something…mystifying. Ben liked mysteries.

And after the thing with Snoke, Ben's life had lots of mysteries.

Which was fine, Ben's always loved the seduction of following hints, rumours, the thread of a thing, uncovering a source, an edge, something he can throw himself into. Because Ben Amidala Solo Organa Kylo Skywalker Ren And Whatever Else, he's always needed big, _been_ big—yeah, yeah much too big for one name—he's always needed the forward momentum of _fate._

Skin as pale as a painted Naboo king, regal as one with that crown of red hair, it had seemed the brigadier, the broken son of the infamous Commandant Hux, would have been perfect for that. Ben had wanted to breathe in his breath, ask him how he'd taped himself together after shattering and could he would he might he _teach it to Ben?_

Would he let Ben touch him?

Right. Well. The space port came into view, crowded, noisy. The brigadier was neither here nor there, because in an hour _Ben_ wouldn't be here. Mythos had danced his last dance and he'd lift with a Corellian freighter at dawn.

Because Ben Organa was heading home again. Because his mother had called again. Because Han Solo was dying. Yes indeed, Han Solo was dying.

Again.

—  
_The best laid plans…._


	3. History

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> After the friendly fire that ended his military career, Brigadier Armitage Hux's choices have been self-indulgent, maudlin, and unwise. 
> 
> Fortunately that is about to change, though he doesn't know it.
> 
> Neither does the infamous once-upon-a-time Jedi, Ben Organa.

It's exhausting, carrying the weight of history.

Bearing the burden of someone else's deeds is rarely beneficial to the carrier.

You could ask the son of Leia Organa and Han Solo—that is, if you could figure out what to call that son, though therein you have _that_ man's burdens.

Named after a disaffected Jedi, a man who'd watched his old religious order implode in a protracted fit of self-destruction, Ben Kenobi had reached his limit well before the Jedi reached theirs. By the time Kenobi was on Tatooine, his Order was nearly extinct and old Ben kept company with sand flies and profoggs and didn't spare much thought for what he might have done differently all those years ago because no one, not Jedi, not Sith, not even the Voss Mystics had ever figured out how to go back in time.

Right, so, there you go. Bearing the name of a cranky old warrior made lazy with his regret would be legacy enough for most, but that's not where it ended for the son of the famous Organa and infamous Solo, oh hell no.

Named also after his mother, Leia Organa, who herself carries the weight of a legendary legacy but got around that burden by daily creating her own. Born a princess, Leia became a general and only by dint of turning the offices down (two times and counting), is she not an admiral or a queen.

Doesn't matter, Organa can turn down as many laurels as she likes and still she's known all the way to the Outer Rim and frankly Ben won't be surprised if a religion's grown up around his mother somewhere. Or her hair. Because god that hair. She's always worn it like a crown and until he was sixteen Ben's hair went down to his ass, as often as not in braids. He rather misses it actually and some days thinks he'll let it grow again but so far he hasn't.

While Ben Kenobi might be considered a neutral bit of Ben's heritage and Leia Organa a representative of the Light, Ben's grandfather Anakin Skywalker, alias Darth Kriffing Vader, is the poster child for the Dark, accepting that mantle so far as to dress in black subtlety be damned.

That's three historical figures in young Ben's background and still doesn't even touch on Ben's father or his uncle Luke. Their legends veer from one spectrum to the other: That they were noble rebels, that they were spies for the Empire, that they were lovers, enemies, or in the case of Luke, not even real, just a myth.

Suffice to say hefting the weight of history is no picnic for Ben (Kylo Ren) Amidala Solo Skywalker Organa and, like Kenobi, Ben's figured out the best way to shuck that weight is to hide from it. Hence his lovely sojourn in Abka and at whose second-busiest spaceport he's staring right now, waiting for a ship lifting to Gandealm where he can catch one of the freighters on the Correllian Run and thence to Coruscant and the Naboo Embassy, where his mother is now and where his father is dancing with shades of Hell.

Ben Solo Organa closed his eyes, tired and not just a little bit annoyed.

This was the third time his daddy'd been about to die.

*

Two words are more than enough to remind the forgetful of the weight of history which Brigadier Armitage Hux carries.

Those words are these: Project Harvester.

Roll that phrase around your tongue. Know that it references sentient creatures. Do you think the harvesting of which it speaks is a thing benign to those creatures or do you understand that those words were code for the bloody harvesting of Force-sensitive children?

Once found, these children were trained in the ways of the Force through torture and murder and it's pretty safe to say that young brigadier Hux would, if he could, plump for Ben's long and well-populated past for just those reasons: It is busy, vast, and colorful. A stranger might remember that Ben's grandfather was Darth Vader, but they'd just as likely remember that his grandmother was a queen, that his mother has been perhaps the most tireless fighter in any and every iteration of the Republic and its endless wars, and that Ben himself was once know as a healer.

So yeah, Ben's background is so kriffing cluttered with melodrama most people approach the man with something akin to intrigue if not outright awe.

Hux? Well he joined the army like his father, he's built like his father was in his youth, he has his father's red hair. When you look at Armitage Hux you can be forgiven for knowing only one thing about him: He is the son of a child killer.

It doesn't matter that the brigadier came of age in a time of peace, that he has been a key architect in maintaining that peace, that he has publically repudiated the war crimes committed by both Empire and Republic. When strangers see Armitage Hux they do not see that good man, they see Commandant Brendol Hux and no one is in awe of that.

All this, _all of this_ is by way of saying that there's little joy in being weighted down by your heritage, whether that heritage is good or bad. Much better is to make your own mark, be your own legend.

"No, no, no. That's garbage," slurred Hux to the waiter. "Serious garbage who told you that?" Mouth hanging open Hux peered hard at the waiter, blinked, then shouted, "Willow!" He burped gently, belatedly covered his mouth with the back of his hand. "Pardon. That's not your name. I jus' call you that in my head."

Train of thought completely derailed Hux blinked bleary and went suddenly back to feeling sorry for himself. "He said 'tomorrow' you know. To me." Hux looked at the stage on which a masked dancer did not dance. "He said tomorrow and iss tomorrow."

Willow-not-Willow is used to drunks. He can tell the mad from the maudlin and has learned to behave in ways appropriate to his own self-preservation. The aggressive ones can be handled in a way to maximize the money they will spend; the maudlin are less inclined and sometimes twice as cruel, so Willow-not-Willow left the sad man to the dregs of his drink.

"The thing is," Hux mumbled after him, "tonight was tomorrow. Tonight was now, right this minute. Except…"

Except that wasn't really true. It was too late. Far too late for Mythos. Hux had woke hours and hours after the dancer had danced and by the time he took his seat—front, center, ever and always—the Jedi-not-Jedi was gone.

It didn't matter that if he closed his eyes Hux could still feel a dream man's warm weight on top of him, could still feel goosebumps rise across his skin from an imagined mouth. That dream was not real, Ben Organa had not waited for the brigadier-not-brigadier, and why would he? So now Hux had a prime seat if front of the stage, watching some pfassking creature juggling fire crystals.

Though despite himself Armitage was a little bit enthralled by the impossibility of what the juggler was doing. The fire seemed to hover in the air in a way that fire could not. If one of those balls fell into his lap Hux ruminated that he was so alcohol-sodden he might burst into flame.

Instead of laughing himself stupid at this foolishness Hux went back to lamenting. "He said _tomorrow_ and tomorrow and tomorrow."

Settling in well and good with his self-pity, because tallying up all the ways his life was busy hurting him was a familiar comfort, Hux suddenly remembered he was in the middle of ordering another drink.

Armitage looked up, "Two brandies," on the tip of his tongue, but Willow the waiter was gone.

He settled a hand against his chest. Without even pressing he could feel under thin skin the klick that held his chest together. Settling properly into his misery Hux thought about what he'd be without the shifting-moving-living metal knitting up his bones.

Dead.

Or worse, some ruined creature barely held together with what had come before klick—duraglass, that wonderful, revolutionary stuff they only later found out shed microscopic shards of glass into the tender flesh of living organs, killing a being in a way far more painful and insidious than that from which it had supposedly saved them.

Hux ran the pinky of one steady hand—always sometimes somewhat unshakable in a crisis was Brigadier Armitage Hux—along the long, thin fret of one of his thin new ribs. What grim surprises would klick unveil a dozen years from now, Hux wondered? Would it rust inside his wet, Human body? Maybe as he aged it'd grow brittler than the bones his chest no longer had, breaking with sudden finality one day when he took a too-deep breath.

Ah but Armitage's most frequent nightmare was that the klick would one day creep beyond the proscribed boundaries of his missing bones, that it'd go deep, begin to feed on his organic matter, transmuting into metal tissue, vein and slippery-wet blood.

Ancient sorcerers used to talk about that back before the Jedi and Sith and Ssi-ruuk thought up their dark religions, back when people believed in the mythical power of moons, in lakes of iron, in creatures with bodies of gold and blood of lead.

All those Outer World religions, the ones that had seemed so full of superstition, in the end the best of them predicted what would come, how hubris turned to tragedy. It was as if Sentients would always be no better than animals who ran only on instinct, as if the very acts of hope and striving were poisons which always and ever brought thinkers _down._

Hux swayed in his chair and unseeing he watched the juggler juggling. He pressed, pressed, pressed at his chest, at soft healing spots, until he could feel his face and neck and chest prickling with adrenaline, until he stood on the precipice of fear, that razor-thin and bloody edge of tipping over into pain.

The juggler dropped a fire crystal just then and some primal part of Hux recoiled, as if his fancy of before could come true, the flame sending him up in a ridiculous bonfire.

"Pfassk it," he growling, standing quickly, swaying. "Just pfassk everything."

Pretty holiday crowds looked at the soldier—his shouldered great coat clearly marked with the bright flash of his regiment—swaying and swearing. After a moment most looked away. They weren't in _Murderers, Traitors, and Thieves_ to care about some drunk stranger, they were here to sup on rare food, illicit drink, exotic love, to dream themselves roguish, to forget things needing forgetting.

Most would succeed but Brigadier Armitage Hux—Ari to his intimates, of whom he had none—was not one of them.

So the soldier, remembering everything he'd like to forget and feeling pretty bad about the whole bloody lot of it, frowned and decided he was done with this place where the waiter didn't fill your glass soon enough, where he couldn't forget that he'd once been the child of a killer and where a moment of hope offered by a beautiful man turned out instead to be as ephemeral as the sanctity of a body after a blaster bolt and—

"Ah!

And there it was.

Hux's body reminded him of the one thing he had managed to forget in the last hour of self-pity and that was this: He'd nearly died quite dead just a couple months ago but he _wasn't_ dead. He was a living breathing man with moving metal knitting him up inside and for a long, long time the pain would stay just ahead of the healing and so—

"Ah!"

Armitage Hux tripped, skittered his empty chair back and himself, his table, and the empty chair across from him forward and right up against the stage.

The localized chaos was enough to still a juggler and silence the crowd and as he collapsed to the floor in a stupidly-named bar Hux remembered two of the important things he _had_ forgotten tonight.

He'd forgotten to take his pain meds.

And boy, oh boy it hurt so much when he did that.

There was one more thing Hux remembered as he lay shaking on the floor, arms and legs stiff, blood flooding flesh fever-hot, just one more thing.

When he hurt, Ari could shout like he was on fucking _fire._

But there was one more thing. One more thing.

_One more thing that changed everything._

Whether or not all those stories about Ben Whoever He Was were true Armitage Hux believed them because this military man, just like any other man, is a complex creature, full of dichotomies and strange desires.

Though he grew up in a clear-cut world of orders, strategy, and obedience, some part of Ari Hux has always believed in sorcery and religion, in rites and the magic of things he can't see.

The child is always father to the man, so while his body shook and his mouth roared, Ari's heart shouted out for magic.

_BenOrganaBenOrganaBenOrgana_

_Ineedyou_

—  
_At first I was unsure why so much of this story has been about Hux's pain. Then I realized it wasn't the pain I want to explore, it's Armitage's choices in response to it. He's grieving for what he lost and uncertain of where he’s going and so his choices haven't been wise. That's about to change._


	4. Need

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> In which Brigadier Armitage Hux goes to his knees, a disciple…
> 
> …and Ben Organa doesn't know how he feels about that.

Ben Organa stared at the cargo ship. It looked like a piece of garbage.

Busy ground crew sluicing around the bulk of him, he frowned at the Surronian freighter which looked nothing like the one around which he'd grown. With a pack at his feet, hands in the pockets of his tatty black robes, Ben did what he'd always done.

"Well," he muttered, "you landed with the garbage, might as well lift with it."

He talked himself through.

Long before he became Kylo Ren, long before he broke himself for good, in the faraway days before anyone even understood the things he could do, Ben did this: With mutters, murmurs, curses and complaints, he kept himself company. He talked to himself.

"Right. Let's just get this over with, hu?"

He talked to himself a _lot._

Yet instead of shuffling forward and getting it over with, Ben looked to the port's rough rafters, across which snaked fuel, electric, and vapor lines. He grunted, annoyed.

God he hated space travel. Hated the way it set his teeth on edge, made his scalp itch, twanged his nerves, as if cell-deep his body knew no body should move as fast as light. He knows it's his imagination, but every damn time he's _out there_ he feels like his blood's going cold and his bones soft, he feels hollow and thin.

Shouldering his rucksack, mumbling nothing much, Ben scuffed toward the shipper's ground cabin, wedged between an insurance seller and a custom's lawyer.

He could have gone to the passenger spaceport, where the floors were not landmines of crates and crap, where prices were half again as much, but those places smelled of regret and hope and as isolated as he might be from the Force, Ben was not completely severed. So he preferred cargo runners, which usually smelled of nothing more than focus and boredom.

"You got room for one Human, leaving tonight?"

In a couple minutes the deal was done and, with an hour to go before they lifted, Ben again shouldered his _daddy's dying_ bag. It contained little, just a few changes of respectfully somber clothes, in case this time Han meant it.

Retracing his steps, Ben headed outside, took a seat at a caf cup-littered table. Sitting with a couple teamsters who ignored the soft beauty of Abka's purple night sky, Ben tried remembering a time when he loved this, when he skipped toward a shuttle or ship, shouting, "Hurry!" to his parents.

Leia and Han were still on the same side in those long-ago days, their lives hallmarked by synchronized movement. To and from, there and back again. "A galaxy at peace stays that way only through vigilance," his mother said often, and so their small family were vigilant.

Things changed slowly but in retrospect it felt sharp.

Suddenly it seemed war was again imminent and his mother made brigadier, then general. War was imminent and his father went back to smuggling. War was imminent and Luke turned attentions to more easily-guided padawans.

And five-year-old Ben, Force-sensitive in ways his masters still did not yet understand, turned toward the tutor who was different from all the others. Master Snoke listened more than he spoke, and when he did respond, he echoed Ben's little boy words, encouraged his outlandish desires. "Do it, young one. See what happens."

What happened was that the Galactic Concordance held. Flairs of aggression across a half dozen Colony worlds stuttered and died when the might of the Core robbed them of their oxygen. But by then Leia and Han had finally ended up on sides of their own personal fight from which neither would budge, and Ben began learning ways of the Force untaught by the Jedi.

"Kriff," Ben muttered, the gaze of a tech sliding over him. This, right here, was why he _really_ hated spaceports. They didn't smell of the regret and hope of strangers. They still reeked of his own.

"Right. That's just fine, really fine," he said, and that same tech gave up glancing and just stared. All Ben had to do was get to Coruscant. Make an appearance. To and from, there and back again. Like before. Like always.

Because Han wasn't dying, he was never dying. Sure Ben's broken, but even a crippled man has _something_ left in him and if there were people in this galaxy Benjamin Organa could still feel through the Force, those people were his mother and his father.

Shoving away from the small table Ben got up, started pacing the busy boardwalk a dozen feet distant, trying to shake out old agitation, new tension.

It wasn't like there was anything on Illodia for him anyway, he might as well just go somewhere else. Dance in that somewhere else. Because the dancing was good. The Force had all but left him but not the need to feel that flow, to feel the bright spark of _life._ In the lust of others he found a raw facsimile of that flow because even the Force-blind know when they're wanted, even the dimmest Sentient could sense another in rut, could literally smell it in wanting sweat, feel it in the heat of bare skin.

Ben was far from dim and to fill an empty place in him, he danced, wanting strangers to want him. And every night he got it.

Then one night it was _he_ who wanted.

There, yes, just left of the stage. The red-haired man.

It wasn't the hair that caught Ben's eye at first though, it was long white fingers tented over a narrow, black-clad chest. The gesture, that gesture had looked _so_ much like something Luke Skywalker used to do.

To help the younglings focus themselves in the Force, his uncle used to spread his fingers, tell them to imagine the strings of an instrument beneath each fingertip. "You hear the music of the Force, I know you do," he'd say, low and slow as if disinclined to talk over the soft symphony he assured them was all around. "But to make the music yourself you have to reach out and touch."

So yeah, with that old mumbo-jumbo bubbling up in his head, the pale man's delicately-placed hand was what Ben saw first. Then Ben's gaze flicked up.

He knew in that moment who sat just left of his stage. Sure the brigadier looked different from all the news holos Ben'd seen after the man's accident. He was whiter than the cameras had ever made him, an ethereal pale, a color otherworldly of itself but then there was…

…that hair. What was it like to move through a universe of Humans with hair like that? Bright as a setting sun, showy as a comet, it singled him out, his very own light. A man couldn't hide with hair like that and so Ben knew the bearded Brigadier Hux for who he was.

And he was, oh he was so very, very pretty.

Not for a long time had Ben wanted more than to be wanted. Moving slow and almost-drunk through an audience's desire had been enough. And then.

Then, night after night after night the brigadier came back, gaze steady and wide-eyed, his hands wrapped around a drink, sometimes two, other times one of those pale hands would be tented over his chest as if in delicate protection and it wasn't so very long before, as the curtain opened, Ben's heart would beat double, sweat prick his skin, cock plumping in gauzy pants.

And night after night after night Ben would look but not look at the brigadier and Ben would sway hips more sinuous, raise arms more sensuous; he would pout, moan soft and low.

Thinking himself invisible behind his mask, Ben Organa, who'd gone and given himself yet another name when he called himself Mythos, adored the distraction of that pretty brigadier. As if his desire were a sweet he could roll around in his mouth and _suck,_ Ben _wanted_ at the man so that the man would want him in return.

And he thought he had. Thought the brigadier had desired him, but you know what?

"There are much less public ways to find that shit out Ben," he groused as he paced the boardwalk, not for the first time taking himself to task. Kneel before a man before a roomful of others, breathe your desire on him and, well, of course he'll disappear like that red smoke they served at _Murderers, Traitors and Thieves,_ a sweet narcotic to suck-breathe-swallow until you were loose-limbed and willing.

Right. In his very public seduction Ben hadn't given the man much choice but to run away. Tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow had come, gone, and it didn't matter how long Ben stood behind that dusty curtain afterward, the man with the firelight hair hadn't come back.

Then there was daddy. Because there was _always_ daddy. The neediest man on a dozen times a dozen worlds, the man who'd picked a woman who needed next to nothing. Like father like son, the two of them so desperate for purpose and focus, for something to do that was worth doing yet somehow never quite finding it, not in Leia, not in the Concordance, not in smuggling or space travel.

Or the Force. As present in his cells as oxygen, Ben learned that for him the Force almost _was_ oxygen and, like that gas, it could be both vital and poisonous. "Oh mumble mumble mumble," he mumbled at a passing family of Squibs, talking himself out of an old and familiar descent into self-pity. "Back to it," he said, standing tall and heading again to the spaceport.

_BenOrgana_

Only to stop quick-smart in the middle of the crowded boardwalk—and that was Ben all over wasn't it, a massive rock in indifferent rapids?—and close his eyes against a sudden sweet pain.

Ben grinned. He'd known this lovely misery since he was the littlest little, a wonderful hurt so often nearly more than his small body could take, it was a surge in the Force that left him both weak-kneed and shaking with energy, it is—

_BenOrgana_

"Oh no. No no no no no." Ben's smile fell away because it _was._ It was and no longer _is._ Ben hadn't felt the Force like this since the day Snoke died, since his abilities had been stripped well and true except—

—except that first time Han almost kicked it, a dozen years ago during a blaster fight when some angry assholes were furious that his asshole father had ripped them off _again_ and—

_BenOrgana_

—but no no no this wasn't that. This wasn't Han, this wasn't Leia. Ben stared at a blue-skinned woman missing her tchun lekku as if by virtue of proximity it must be her, but she was past and gone before he could say a word and though he stared into eyes both red and green and white and black it was not a single Sentient brushing, none seemed to see the man who tried seeing into them, a thing he used to do as easy as breathing but couldn't, didn't, hasn't in so, so—

_BenOrgana_

And then there it was. Shoulders dropping fists opening mouth eyes heart head all of it opened, _blossomed_ yes, _bloomed._ Because Ben felt it now, the who and the where. He didn't need some symphony or fucking midichlorians or all that garbage Luke had gone on about, all Ben needed was to…follow.

Walking away from a forgotten rucksack, a berth in a cargo freighter bound for the Rimmat Run, Ben Organa, once and future Force healer, man with too many names, too much history and too many losses, walked back toward Abka. He followed air that danced like flame and hadn't vagary like that driven Luke crazy?—but it did, it was the orange-red of firelight and so Ben knew who called him, he did because he'd touched the brigadier, for only a moment but it was enough it was more than—

_Ineedyou_

Later, days and weeks after this day, Ben will whisper to Ari in their bed that, even before he'd said _need,_ before a need which implied want which maybe implied desire, even before that Ben was on his way through the nighttime crowds, through not around because, big as a battle droid, Ben's a bulky creature. He doesn't mean to take up the space he does, he _does_ and so in his focus he moved through instead of around the ceaseless flow of Sentients, his heavy footfalls thudding across that boardwalk, getting him from there to a speeder bike driver to Abka to…

_Murderers, Traitors and Thieves_

"And you were gone," Ben will murmur soft into Ari's mouth not too many days from this day, but today, tonight Ben pushed into the bar from which he'd not four hours ago taken leave and instead of finding flame he found guttering coals.

"Where is he?"

Armitage Hux had made himself a focal point around which the shock of strangers could center, amping signal and though the heart was gone the waves continued to ebb out, so Willow-not-Willow blinked his crystal eyes and pointed.

Ben Organa was gone before the man's slim blue arm fell.

*

It's a funny thing, when you're not thinking. You do stuff you wouldn't do if you just paused one kriffing minute and had yourself a deep thought. But Ben Organa did not go and do that little thing, that having a deep thought thing, he just bulled his big way into the posada not two dozen feet across from _Murderers, Traitors and Thieves,_ barking, "Brigadier Hux!" so forcefully two cleaning droids startled, pointed in the same direction, and shouted, "Temple, sir!"

So though he should have, as Ben ran down a narrow corridor the thing he emphatically did not do was think things through.

He did not think that each time he'd seen the brigadier from his stage, that the man was the kind of deeply still that careful drunks become.

Didn't think that the man's white skin so often shone damp with the sweat of fever.

Running round a corner to the sound of shouts, Ben didn't at that moment think that the brigadier's direct gaze was, it was—

Through an open door came first one boot, then another and the shout of, "I don't kriffing _care_ if it kills me, I want the lethe."

And then through that door, which instead of a number bore the name _Temple,_ after some long-forgotten Abka politician, Ari Hux stumbled. One, two, three heartbeats after turning to see the sorcerer, the _healer_ in his black robes, the fire-haired soldier sank to his knees in that hallway, bare-chested, bloody, and beatific.

"You're here."

—it was that of a devotee.

**Author's Note:**

> ...here's an image of [what's inside Hux's chest](http://atlinmerrick.tumblr.com/post/145680720589/fic-murderers-traitors-and-thieves-the-galactic).


End file.
